


Ursa Major, Ursa Minor

by WeAreTheCyclones



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Abandonment Issues, Angst, Baby Keith (Voltron), Galaxy Garrison, Gen, Keith (Voltron)-centric, Pre-Kerberos Mission, dealing with death, single dad kogane, takashi shirogane is super cool!!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-22
Updated: 2018-07-22
Packaged: 2019-06-14 15:13:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15391548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WeAreTheCyclones/pseuds/WeAreTheCyclones
Summary: He’s four years old the first time he asks about her. Head too big for his narrow shoulders, hair unruly, eyes wide and searching. He looks like her.“What happened to my mom?” (And with that tone, he sounds like her too. Authoritative, tough.)





	Ursa Major, Ursa Minor

**Author's Note:**

> It's ya girl's first Voltron fic!
> 
> ** As a note, the 13 year old Keith and Shiro moment at the end truly is not trying to be shippy, he's 13. It's more of a "wow this guy is cool and I look up to him and he believes in me." Please don't come for me, VLD fandom.

Keith cries for a week after Krolia leaves.

Tex begs. He bargains. He walks through every reason on the “why is my baby crying” search results. Twice. Three times.

Why is my baby crying?

Hunger? No.

Illness? No.

Exhaustion? Probably part of it.

Dirty diaper? Occasionally, but that’s more of a Broken Clock Theory situation. 

Needing to be burped? Needing to be held? Being too hot or too cold? 

But Tex knows. As much as he reads these articles on these soft-pink and teddy bear filled websites, Tex knows none of them can tell him what he already knows about his kid.

Keith desperately misses his mother. 

Tex desperately misses her too.

When doing laundry, Tex finds a sweater that still smells like her. In the eleventh hour of his sanity, Tex wraps Keith in it and cradles him against his chest and begs him to be quiet, to sleep, to forgive his mother, to forgive him…

And he finally stops crying.

**

**Four.**

 

He’s four years old the first time he asks about her. Head too big for his narrow shoulders, hair unruly, eyes wide and searching. He looks like her.

“What happened to my mom?” (And with that tone, he sounds like her too. Authoritative, tough.)

Tex fumbles the knife in his hands, dropping it and a healthy glob of peanut butter onto the counter. When he turns to look at his son, the little guy has one sharp eyebrow lifted and his hands on his hips.

“She left,” Tex says. It’s not a lie. 

“Where’d she go?” 

And this is where Tex gets to decide the narrative that will hurt Keith for the rest of his life. He’d meant to get his story straight before this day, he really had. He had a few woefully ill-thought out drafts stored in his mind for how to answer this question, always knowing that any angle he could possibly chose would be sharp enough to cut. 

Tex takes a stalling breath and sighs as he reaches for a paper towel to wipe up the peanut butter. Keith huffs, impatient. 

“If I knew the answer to that,” he starts… and in a split second, he decides. “I’d go and get her myself.” 

That’s not a lie either. 

Keith stays silent while Tex carefully cuts his sandwich into four triangles and trims off the crust. 

“Table,” Tex says, gesturing with the plate. 

Keith climbs into his preferred chair and wrinkles his nose at the apple Tex sets next to the plate. 

He shouldn’t push it. He shouldn’t open himself up to more questions. He shouldn’t… but Keith’s silence is heavy. 

“Why do you ask?” Tex asks.

“Because everyone has a mom and I don’t,” he says, not looking up. He tears at his sandwich, jelly running over his small fingers. 

The father in Tex notes that he’s not actually eating anything. The single father in him lets him have this…

His voice catches in his throat when he says, “You have a mother too.” 

Keith’s head bobs, almost a nod. The white bread bruises grape jelly purple the more Keith mangles it. 

Tex wants to ask if some punk at school said something. He wants to ask if there’s more he wants to know about his mom. Her name, what she was like, what she looked like… Anything. But Tex doesn’t want to have to lie, either. 

He waits until it seems the moment of curiosity has passed before letting his fatherly instinct to make sure his kid actually eats take over.

“Well, kiddo, unless you’re a tree and your fingers are roots, I don’t think that’s how you eat peanut butter and jelly,” Tex says, tone light and airy. 

“You’re weird, daddy,” Keith says, but his lips quirk in a little smile. Tex’s heart is fueled by that little smile. 

“I’m weird?” Tex gasps. “Says the kid with roots for hands!” 

Keith’s smile kicks it up to full voltage, knocking Tex right out. He reaches over and ruffles his hair, Keith squirming under his hand and laughing. 

He laughs like his mother too. 

**

**Five.**

 

Tex pulls up to the curb just in time to see Keith tackle a kid to the ground. 

“Christ Almighty,” he mutters, hastily hopping down from the truck.

“Boys, boys, break it up,” he thunders, grabbing Keith by the scruff of his neck and tugging him away. He swears he sees a flash of gold in his eyes when he rears his head back.

Keith is practically frothing at the mouth while the other kid holds his bleeding nose and screams. A teacher runs over then, converging on the screamer while Keith furiously mutters the same thing over and over again, fighting against his dad’s grip on the back of his collar.

“Keith!” Tex barks. He kneels and pulls his shoulders square to him, making him focus. “What the hell was that all about?” 

“—Said my mom was dead, he said my mom was dead, he said my mom was dead and- and-“ 

Tex feels the fight drain right out of Keith, feels his body go slack and limp and he pitches forward and buries his face against Tex’s chest. His whole body shakes as he sobs.

“Oh, buddy, I’m sorry,” he soothes. Tex runs his hands over the back of his head, down his neck, over his thin shoulders. HIs own heart stutters in his chest.

He shoots the teacher a glance over Keith’s head but she’s busy settling the other kid down enough to take him to the nurse’s office. He’ll probably hear all about this in the principal’s office tomorrow morning anyway, so he reaches down for Keith’s backpack and hoists Keith up as he stands. 

“Let’s go home, kiddo,” he says, pressing a kiss against his hair. 

Keith cries his little heart out the whole time Tex gets him settled in his booster seat and puts on his favorite radio station and offers McDonald’s for dinner. By the time they pull up to the house, the sobbing has quieted to a trembling-chinned whimper. 

“Buddy, you can’t get in fights,” Tex says as he stands outside Keith’s side of the truck and looks him in the puffy eyes. “I know people say and do mean things, but hitting someone is never the answer.”

Keith sets his jaw, eyebrows furrowed, silent tears pooling in his eyes. He nods once, like a soldier receiving an order. Tex wipes his cheeks with his thumbs and kisses his forehead before unbuckling him.

“Is she dead?” he asks, voice wavering.

Tex’s heart stops. He fumbles. “No.”

“Then where is she?”

“I told you, Keith, I don’t know.”

“Why’d she leave?”

“I don’t know that either.”

“Liar,” he says in a soft voice that may as well be a scream for how much it hits Tex in the gut. 

“I’m not…”

“You’re a liar!” he says, louder this time. He slides out of the booster seat and out of the truck all on his own and takes off running toward the house.

The kid is up the stairs and slamming his bedroom door before Tex can even clear the porch. He sighs and sinks down into the arm chair and keeps sinking into the floor and through the surface of the earth and right down to the hot, angry core of the planet. Tex feels so heavy he can barely breathe.

She’s not dead.  
She can’t be dead.

A woman like that? 

But part of him wonders why she hasn’t come back. Why she hasn’t sent a message. Part of him wonders if she thinks of them. 

But she must.

**

**Seven.**

 

It had been so hot all day that even now the usually crisp desert night air can’t fix it. A dry wind whistles through the canyons, sweeping clouds of dust around the yard. The tire swing’s rope creaks. Tex leans heavily against the porch railing, a mostly full bottle of beer dangling from his fingers. 

It’s impossible to sleep on nights like this. 

It was a night like this when an alien ship crashed in front of his house about 8 years ago. 

Nothing that happened after that ever made sense, probably never would. But Tex can’t remember a single day since Krolia left when his heart didn’t break all over again. 

He misses her weirdness. Her beauty. Her fierce love. 

He misses her for their son. He misses her for all the things Keith will probably never know about her.

He hears the second stair from the bottom squeak and tilts his head toward the sound. Light footsteps shuffle across the living room and pause at the screen door. 

“Dad?” Keith asks.

“Everything alright?” Tex asks, setting his beer down on floor before turning to open the door. 

“Can’t sleep,” he says, rubbing his eyes. 

He remembers Krolia leaning over his crib to kiss him one last time. Keith wasn’t even awake for it. His chest constricts at the thought.

“Me neither,” Tex says, gathering him into his arms. “Wanna stargaze?”

Keith nods, grinning. His hair flops forward into his eyes and Tex pushes it back away from his sweaty forehead. 

He remembers Krolia smiling down at their baby, looking about as soft as she ever did, her hair falling into her golden eyes. 

Tex, Keith wrapped safely in his arms, walks down the steps and out beyond the yard. Keith still smells clean, like the green apple soap that comes in a bottle shaped like The Hulk and laundry detergent. Tex breathes him in and squeezes him for how much he loves the kid. 

Keith laughs his mother’s laugh and squeezes Tex back. He squirms until he can look straight up at the field of stars above. Tex swings him onto his shoulders and stops just past where the ring of light from the porch fades to black. 

Keith’s sharp chin rests against the top of his head, his arms loose around his ears. “Dad, which is your favorite?” he asks.

“Well, I know last time I said it was Catticus Largicus—“

“That’s not real!” Keith corrects.

“Excuse you, it ain’t real? What do you know, huh?”

“I read all about constellations, there isn’t one called Catticus Largicus.”

“Then why do those ones look like a big ole cat?”

“Leo is a big cat, Leo can be your favorite.”

“Nah,” Tex laughs. “I have a new favorite this time. Nothing to do with cats.”

“Okay, but it has to be a real one,” Keith says in that tone. Authoritative. Rough.

“It is! I promise, scout’s honor.” Tex takes one of Keith’s hands and points it toward the sky. “See that bright one?”

“Uh huh.”

“That’s the North Star, Polaris.”

“Yeah,” Keith confirms.

“Alright, smarty pants,” Tex laughs. He moves Keith’s hand in a curve. “See that swoop? And the box?” 

“Yeah.”

“That’s the Little Dipper. That’s you.”

“Okay,” he says, skeptical. 

Tex moves Keith’s hand back up to Polaris. “Now let’s draw a straight line like this…” He drags his hand down and to the right. “See that box? And the tail?”

“Uh huh, that’s the Big Dipper.”

“Yep. That one is me.”

“Hm. So your favorite constellations are the Big and Little Dipper?” Keith asks, judgmental.

“Kid, you’re something,” Tex laughs, swinging him back down off his shoulders and into his arms, cradling him like a baby. Keith laughs, bright and happy. Tex’s heart and soul recharge at the sound.

“There’s nothing wrong with liking the Dippers,” Keith says, soft and kind. Apologetic. 

“I know that. But, did you know they’re actually not constellations?”

Keith’s face stills, suspicious.

“They’re part of bigger constellations. Ursa Major and Ursa Minor. Big and Little Bear. That’s us too.”

“Huh,” Keith says, impressed. 

“Your old man knows a thing or two,” Tex says. He sets Keith down and crouches beside him. 

“I know you do. You’re the smartest person I know, dad,” he says, earnest, before looking back up at the sky. 

“Why thank you.” Tex slings an arm around Keith’s shoulders and follow this gaze up. “Which is your favorite this time?”

Keith stays silent in thought for awhile. “I like Ursa Major and Ursa Minor best too.”

Tex turns his head to kiss his cheek. “You and me, boy.” 

When Keith starts yawning and shivering against his side, Tex calls it a night. He carries him back toward the house, loving him with each step.

“Dad,” he says softly.

“Keith?”

“If we’re the big and little bear, which constellation would mom be?”

He breathes through the wave of mourning that hits him. He wants to give his son an honest answer, something to carry him to sleep at night.

He thinks of that big, blue lion in the cave… the one that brought her here, the one that in some crazy way resulted in Keith…

“She’d be Leo. Fierce and beautiful as a lion.”

**

**Eight.**

 

According to Keith’s end of year report card, Tex has a very smart kid on his hands. He could have told anyone that. Keith’s been tripping him up in conversation since he could speak full sentences. 

And yet, Keith is glowering in the passenger seat, as tensely silent as the second before a thunderstorm.

Keith’s report card also says he struggles to connect with his classmates and has a general distrust of authority figures. 

“So…?” Keith asks finally.

“Well, your grades are great.” (Keith scoffs.) “What’s this about distrust of authority figures?”

“What’s that mean?”

Tex honestly can’t tell if he’s playing dumb or not. “I think it means you have issues following orders from adults. Is that true?”

Keith shrugs. 

Tex sighs and folds the report card. “I’m proud of those grades, kiddo.”

“Thanks.”

Keith is not a broken kid. He isn’t. He’s a kid whose life started out with heartbreak. He’s a kid with so much light and dark in him, Tex is surprised he doesn’t blink out of existence altogether sometimes. 

But mostly, he’s light. He’s pure, strong, golden light. And maybe that’s not just the fatherly part of him speaking.

It’s his job to do what he can to help Keith show the world that, isn’t it?

“Why do you think your teacher thinks you don’t connect well with other kids?”

“Because I don’t.”

Tex resists the urge to laugh. “Okay, and why do you think you don’t?”

A moody shrug. 

Tex thinks of the things the other men and women at the fire department say their kids are involved in. Soccer, piano, putting on plays, dancing… He can’t fathom Keith doing any of that.

Karate, though.

And maybe in a few years, flight class. The ones where the kids learn in simulators. It’s a fast track to the Galaxy Garrison, or so Tex has heard. 

“You’re going to have a lot of spare time this summer,” Tex says. 

Keith nods.

“Want to take a class or play a sport or anything?”  
Keith’s eyes slide toward him, suspicious. “Do I have to?”

“It’s not a punishment. But I think it’d be good for you.”

“Just because some stupid teacher says I don’t listen?”

“Hey,” Tex warns. “Don’t call people stupid.”

“Well, what if they are stupid?”

There’s a bold-faced lack of humor in the statement that does nothing but remind Tex that his kid is half-alien. He doesn’t let the reminder make him smile. 

“That’s neither here nor there, Keith. Not up to you to determine other people’s intelligence.”

That gets a hearty scoff. 

“Anyway,” Tex redirects. “What do you think about karate? Tae Kwon Do? Something where you get to break boards and kick your instructor?”

Keith’s silence is appraising. 

“And it’s not a punishment, it’s a reward for your good grades. If you want it.”

“Yeah, right. You sure it isn’t to make me get along with other kids?”

“And what would the problem with that be, huh?”

He’s got him there. Keith crosses his arms and wiggles his shoulders back into the seat. 

“And maybe you’ll learn that other adults have your best interest at heart too. Or at least you’ll learn to listen to them so they stay off your case.” Tex had always subscribed to the latter philosophy growing up. A little resistance to authority seems to be a trait Keith got from both parents. 

“Fine.” 

“Fine as in you want to take a class?”

“In kicking my teachers? Yes.”

“Okay, well, you gotta have a different attitude than that. Kicking teachers is the bonus.”

Keith bites his lip to prevent a smile. “Okay.”

**

**Nine.**

 

“I want to know about her.”

Tex tears his eyes away from the game, muted while Christmas music plays through the house. 

“Your mom?” he asks. Keith nods. 

He looks so strong with his chin set and his eyes hard. Tex knows his son better than to believe it.

“What do you want to know?” 

Bing Crosby croons about a white Christmas while flurries of sand and dried up leaves crackle against the windows of the house. Keith stares with an unfocused gaze at the TV, one fist clenching and unclenching where it rests against the arm of the couch. 

“What was her name?” Keith asks, finally. 

And as much as Tex wants to tell him, he can’t.

“Katherine,” he lies. 

“What’s her last name?”

Keith knows they were never married. He’d asked that once way back when he couldn’t tie his own shoes yet. Tex doesn’t know how to answer but to appeal to Keith’s pride in being Japanese. He’s running through possible last names when Keith scowls.

“Why won’t you just tell me?”

“Because I’m worried,” he says, and that’s the truth. 

“Even if I found her, I wouldn’t… do anything stupid, I just…”

“Tanaka,” Tex says, mostly just to staunch the white-hot sorrow tearing through him. “Katherine Tanaka. Goes by Katie. I’ve looked for her, I think she’s using a different name.”

“Why?” Keith asks, fraught and furious. “Why would she go by a different name? Who was she? Why did she leave? I don’t… I don’t understand.”

Frank Sinatra wishes them a Merry Little Christmas, players on the screen struggle toward the end zone, Keith’s breathing is ragged. His face, still soft with baby fat, twists and contorts as he tries to contain the myriad of raw emotions he’s too young to even be able to define… Tex just sits there watching.

“She was… a complicated woman.”

Keith takes that in, eyes steady while his jaw tenses and releases and tenses again. He deserves more than that. Tex wants to tell him everything. How his mother was a warrior. How his mother was beautiful and wild and evolved and brutal and strong and wise and so soft with him it was almost unbelievable… Tex remembers her golden eyes, the way her sharp teeth pressed into her lip as she looked down at Keith for the first time, the incredible power she exuded at all times, like she was a nuclear reactor. She was the most incredible living thing Tex had ever known.

Aside from her son, that is. Aside from Keith…

“Keith,” Tex says, voice breaking.

“She was my mom,” Keith says. Tears gather in his eyes but he stays solid and unmoving. 

“Yes.”

“The less you tell me, the more I hate her.”

“Keith…”

In a flurry of movement too fast to be human, Keith slams his fist into the coffee table and disappears up the stairs.

The radio DJ announces how many shopping days there are until Christmas. The wind howls through the canyons and whistles through a window that wasn’t closed all the way. The game cuts to commercials. 

**

**Eleven.**

Keith cries for a week when his dad dies. 

He’d cry even longer if he had it in him.

Takeru “Tex” Kogane had died a hero, which Keith thinks is supposed to be a consolation. The bitterest, ugliest part of him (the part his father was constantly trying to help him maintain, he knows that now that it’s unchecked…) is so angry that he had to choose being a hero over being a dad. The softest, most loving part of him is horrified of being alone.

He can’t even breathe sometimes.

But he can fight. 

When his anger flares, when the flames of it lick at the inside of his skin, he can punch. He can kick. He can use his words like knives. 

It doesn’t matter that he always ends up in detention for it. It doesn’t matter if the case worker says his bad behavior will most assuredly keep him from getting adopted. It doesn’t fucking matter at all. 

Keith, unmoored. Keith, alone. Keith, abandoned. 

It is what it is.

Sometimes, like tonight, when his practiced numbness gives way to bone-crushing agony, Keith slips out of the window of the room he shares with ten other boys. Sometimes he just sits on the roof. Sometimes he walks as far as he can before he knows he has to turn back.

But tonight, he hot-wires the caretaker’s car and drives it out to the desert so he can breathe and yell and throw rocks in peace. He needs to feel grounded. He needs to smell sage and warm earth and cold night. He needs to look up and see stars. He needs to be somewhere where no one can see him…

No one but Ursa Major and Ursa Minor. And Leo, he supposes. But fuck her. Fuck Katherine Tanaka, a name so generic it might even be made up for all Keith knows. He’d done everything he could to follow that thread to a woman who could take him in and love him for the first time in her fucking life and it led nowhere.

He screams himself hoarse. His voice boomerangs back to him off the rock walls of the canyons. He sits heavily on the ground and falls onto his back. The stars above, distant and cold, blink down at him. 

He looks for the brightest star. Polaris. He lifts his finger to it and traces the Little Dipper. He drags his finger over to the Big Dipper. Ursa Minor, Ursa Major. 

Stars so far apart from each other it’s unfathomable, but humans decided they belonged together. They drew lines between them and named them. They assigned them meaning and mythologies. Thousands of years ago. 

All that wonder and Keith feels nothing. Nothing at all. He feels more about the dark space in between the stars than the stars themselves.

He drives back to the home, parks the car, sneaks in through the window. He’s almost disappointed when he doesn’t even get caught.

**

**Thirteen.**

 

Takashi Shirogane is a piece of work. A regular Boy Scout. Insufferably honorable and stiff and polished. 

At least, that’s what Keith thinks until he knows better. Shiro Shirogane is impressed that Keith can steal, and drive, his car. Shiro Shirogane is a badass who breaks rules so well he not only gets his way, he gets respect too. Shiro Shirogane is going to teach him how to drive his hover bike off a cliff and live to tell the tale some day.

Keith lives for racing the guy. He’s only ever won once, and he cheated to do it. (Shiro doesn’t mind cheating, he says it’s strategic.) Keith loves the adrenaline, he loves the challenge, he loves talking to Shiro after as they lean against their bikes and watch the sky darken over the desert. 

“Do you like space?” Shiro asks one of those times, looking up at the stars above.

“Yeah,” Keith says. “Who at the Garrison doesn’t?”

Shiro shrugs. “Plenty of people prefer to stay at ground control.”

“Well, not me.” Keith wants to play it cool, but Keith wants to be a pilot just like Shiro someday. 

“How are you doing in your astronavigation course?” he asks, gesturing toward the sky.

“Good.” Keith’s ready to be quizzed, he squares his shoulders and juts his chin toward Shiro in challenge.

“At ease, Keith,” Shiro laughs. “Do you think it’s a waste of time like the other cadets?”

“No, I like it,” Keith admits. “Besides, if my nav goes down, I’m not about to be stuck out there.” 

“That’s the spirit.”

They fall silent together, watching the stars come out. Shiro once told Keith that he was lucky to have grown up here, somewhere mostly untouched by light pollution. He’d told Keith he hadn’t ever seen the Milky Way with his own eyes before coming here.

Keith always looks for Polaris. He makes sure he sees it every night, he mentally tracks its progress across the sky all year long. He could draw a star chart from memory alone if he had to. Sometimes it means nothing to him. Sometimes it makes him so angry he could break. But not always.

“Do you have a favorite constellation?” Keith asks.

“Orion,” Shiro answers immediately. He rolls his head toward Keith and grins. “A mighty hunter with a shiny belt. My kind of guy. What about you?”

“Ursa Major,” Keith says, voice catching. Shiro’s eyebrow lifts but he doesn’t mention it. “Or Leo, maybe… sometimes Leo. I don’t know.” He clears his throat and tears his eyes away. 

“Hm,” Shiro murmurs. 

“My dad and I used to look at the stars when we couldn’t sleep, he’d always make up constellations to make me laugh. But he said Ursa Major and Ursa Minor were his favorite. He said they were us.”

“Ah,” Shiro breathes. “That’s really beautiful.”

Keith smiles. It is. He can allow that to be true. He mulls over the idea of telling Shiro about this mom… it’s so easy to talk to him.

“He said Leo was my mom,” Keith says before he chickens out. “I never knew her, she left when I was a baby.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

Keith shrugs. 

“Have you ever tried to find her?” Shiro asks.

“It’s a dead end.”

“Gotcha.”

“I don’t think I need to find her,” Keith admits. “She doesn’t mean anything to me and I don’t mean anything to her.”

The truth is, the only person who could have ever helped him find her is gone. The only person who had any answers about her at all never gave them. He’d so long ago decided to hate her, why change that now?

“It doesn’t have to be that cut and dry,” Shiro says after some thought. “I think sometimes people walk away from things that mean a lot to them because they can’t handle caring that much.”

Keith doesn’t respond. 

Shiro lets the silence settle around them. Keith likes that Shiro doesn’t always need to fill the air with sound. He likes that Shiro lets Keith breathe and think and _be_. 

His watch beeps, warning him that curfew is approaching. Shiro glances at him and takes it as a cue to start heading back. 

“Wait,” Shiro says before Keith climbs back onto his bike. “Why not Ursa Minor?”

“Huh?”

“You said Ursa Major was your favorite, or sometimes Leo… why not Ursa Minor?”

“Because I don’t miss me, I miss…” Keith’s voice gets caught in his throat.

Shiro watches him, unflinching in the face of Keith’s embarrassing emotions…

“Then I change my answer,” Shiro says. “Ursa Minor is my favorite.”

“Why?” Keith says, incredulous. “Don’t be weird about it, they’re just stars. Constellations are made up anyway, it’s just a stupid thing my dad and I used to do—“

“Bears are cool,” Shiro says with a shrug. “And you can’t stop me from having your back, so deal with it. Race you back to the barracks?” He sticks his tongue out and takes off with no warning. Keith can barely hear him cackling over the sound of the bikes.

“God dammit,” Keith curses but a wicked grin stretches across his face. 

He yells and laughs the whole way back, tailing Shiro but never quite catching up. His lungs are full of crisp air and for once, miraculously, he feels more like starlight than he does like the void.

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: i have no idea how kids are at various stages of their development. Hopefully this doesn't ring too false. He's half alien, that's my justification. :D


End file.
